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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Building a Character. 



BY 



The Li*^ *V 

OF COSGRKSg 



Washington 



ANDREW P. PEABODY,, 

Peofessob of Theology, 
Harvard University. 






T DEI 



QQC 



17 1 «« 



BOSTON: 

James H. Earle, Publisher, 

178 Washington St. 

1886. 



^ 



^ v0 



COPYRIGHT, 1886, 

By James H. Eakle. 



All rights reserved. 



CONTENTS. 



I. STRENGTH AND BEAUTY. 7 

II. STRENGTH. 11 

III. BEAUTY. 33 



PREFACE. 



It will be seen that the material of this 
volume was prepared for a college occasion. 
But, believing that the truths which it encour- 
ages, and the counsels which it gives, are such 
as may deserve the heed of young men in any 
condition of life whatever, the author is in- 
duced to offer it to a larger public, with the 
earnest hope that it may be of service in the 
building of characters that shall stand the test 
of earthly trial and be not unfit for heaven.. 

A. P. PEABODY. 
Harvard College. 



Building a Character, 



i. 

STRENGTH AND BEAUTY. 




" Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary"— Psalms 
xcvi. 6. 

" The temple of God is holy, which temple ye areS'—I. Cor- 
inthians Hi. 17. 

HARACTER-building, for you 
who have the active work of life 
' argely before you, is your most imminent 
duty, and may be your most blessed privi- 
lege ; and character-building ought to be 
temple-building, — the framing and perfect- 
ing of a sanctuary for the indwelling God, 
— a sanctuary in whose firm foundation, 
massive walls, fair proportions, and rich 



8 CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 

adornings there should be blended strength 
and beauty. 

At your age, indeed, we are wont to say 
that character is already formed, and so it 
is, after a fashion, yet not so consolidated 
that it may not be easily re-formed for the 
better or the worse. The present epoch, 
with all of you a great change, with many 
of you an entire change, of condition and 
surroundings, a time when you are first 
thrown upon your own unshared self-coun- 
sel and self-government, is an eminently 
favorable period for the building of which 
I am speaking. Of your past ways and 
habits you have had sufficient experience 
to know which of them should be retained 
and which abandoned ; and for the former 
you will be more free than ever to put 



STRENGTH AND BEAUTY. 



yourselves under congenial and helpful 
influences : as regards the latter you have 
equal freedom to avoid the associations 
which may hitherto have favored them. 

It is, as it seems to me, among the 
peculiar advantages of an academic course, 
that its close makes such a break in the 
continuity of life that as to both mental 
and moral habitudes one may take an en- 
tirely fresh start, with new and more elas- 
tic vigor in every right direction, and with 
every possible encouragement to reverse a 
course that tends to evil. In my long ex- 
perience I have known scores of instances 
in which this has proved itself the momen- 
tous epoch which it seems. I cannot 
recall a single instance, though there may 
have been such, in which a man who grad- 



I O CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 

uated with pure character and manifestly 
high principles has immediately on leaving 
college plunged into vice, or become at 
once callous to moral obligation. But I 
can recall very many who have entered on 
their life-work with a diligence and ear- 
nestness of which their college career gave 
little promise, and I could furnish a list by 
no means short of those who have been 
arrested at this point on a moral declivity 
on which a few more downward steps 
would have been irrevocable ruin. 

Let me then speak to you, with such 
authority as my years may give, of the 
building of character, — of the strength 
and the beauty that should be united in 
you, if it be your aim and purpose to be 
good and to do good. 




II. 

STRENGTH. 

j N speaking of strength as the foun- 
dation of character, I attach no 
small ethical importance to what is often 
slightingly termed mere bodily strength, 
which I would have so utilized as to make 
the qualifying epithet "mere" an imperti- 
nence. When I was in college, gymnastic 
apparatus and training were first intro- 
duced, and their benefits were extended to 
all the members of college, under the 
tuition of our German professor, who was 
an enthusiast in this as in every part of 
his work. After a brief trial, I know not 
why, the whole system was abandoned, 



1 2 CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 



and that for many years; but most of 
those who were its beneficiaries, I am very 
sure, retained through life, and those now 
surviving still retain, the vestiges of the 
vigor thus imparted and given. I rejoice 
in the athletic culture of the present day, 
and yet I wish that it were more equally 
diffused ; for there is danger that it may 
in some cases be carried beyond the needs 
of a liberally educated man, and sometimes 
to a perilous extreme, while the excessive 
ardor of competition may tend to enlist in 
athletic sports comparatively few, and to 
make many who ought to engage in them 
idle and unprofited spectators. 

I want that you should be strong in 
body, chief of all, because the soul depends 
upon the body for its instruments, and in 



STRENGTH. 1 3 



large part for its possibility of healthy 
action, and is circumscribed and enfeebled 
when these instruments are impaired. 
The prevalent euphemism by which we 
term certain vices weaknesses is con- 
temptible as an excuse for one who is 
conscious of ability for the right and of 
the criminality of the wrong ; but it is very 
true in unnumbered instances as describ- 
ing the actual genesis and growth of moral 
evil. The diseases that prey on the trees 
and plants in our orchards and gardens 
often owe their prevalence to the degen- 
eracy and the poor staple of the species 
infected by them. Equally in the field of 
human society, corruption first attacks the 
feeblest plants. There are many who are 
wicked only because they are weak. 



1 4 CHARACTER-B UILDING. 

Many a youth becomes morally depraved 
simply because he has been a stranger to 
fresh air, cold water, and vigorous exercise. 
Bodily weakness is often the strength of 
appetite and passion. The very word 
passion tells its own story. It is passive- 
ness, debility, the being acted upon with- 
out the power of repulsive reaction. 

Then, too, it hardly needs to be said 
that for the more active, energetic, aggres- 
sive forms of virtue, physical strength is 
often an essential pre-requisite. The 
pioneers in human progress, reformers, 
patriots, working philanthropists, mission- 
aries who have been successful propagan- 
dists, have almost always been stout, 
robust, hardy men, who could labor and 
endure to the utmost of human capacity. 



STRENGTH, 1 5 



Such men were Luther, Howard, Oberlin, 
Judson, Livingstone, — men who might 
have been victors in quasi-Olympic con- 
tests, had they not been champions in the 
nobler warfare with the powers of evil. 
To go back still farther, it could have been 
of no little avail in the planting of Chris- 
tianity that its earliest apostles were made 
stern in self-denial, elastic under discour- 
agement, brave in endurance and in peril, 
by their arduous toil and rough exposure 
as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee ; and 
that Paul, last called but foremost, sup- 
ported himself and ministered to the 
necessities of others by manual labor as a 
tent-maker. Nor can I forget that the 
Founder of our religion, whose intense 
energy in the active service of humanity 



1 6 CHAR A CTER-B UILDING. 



is in Christian thought thrown too much 
into the background by the majestic 
sweetness of his spirit in suffering and in 
dying, and to whom, whether the prophet 
so meant it or not, the phrase, " travelling 
in the greatness of his strength/' applies 
as to no other being that ever trod the 
earth, was himself a carpenter, and before 
his public ministry labored in the work- 
shop of Joseph of Nazareth. 

I would say to you, young men, who, I 
trust, have hard and good and faithful work 
before you in your several callings, Make 
yourselves as strong as God will let you 
be. Yet forget not that the strength of 
man, when exercised only for its own sake, 
has no more of dignity or of preciousness 
than that of the ox, horse, or dog, — that it 



STRENGTH. I? 

is worth a man's possessing only when it 
pours its vigor into the extensor muscles 
of the intellect, of the will, of the affec- 
tions kind and devout, of the body that is 
spiritual, incorruptible and eternal. 

Strength of mind is, no less than that of 
body, dependent to a very large degree on 
culture. We have the record, and your 
seniors in age have the knowledge, of not 
a few men of splendid genius, who have, 
sometimes because of vicious habits, 
sometimes because of mere indolence, 
never advanced beyond glorious promise ; 
while among men who have shown an 
ability tantamount to genius there have 
been those with whom the converting of 
one talent into ten has been no hyperbole. 

There are habits of our time that are 



1 8 CHA RACTER-B UILDING. , 



perilous, and often fatal, to the strength of 
mind. Among these I might name desul- 
tory and aimless reading, even of books 
not otherwise than good, when not 
required for needful recreation. Reading, 
on the gravest subjects, is often made to 
supersede thinking. There are minds 
that are rendered dyspeptic by overfeed- 
ing. They have lost the power of assimi- 
lation, and the materials derived from 
books lie round in undigested masses, 
clogging the mental passages, and preclud- 
ing the possibility of vigorous action. 

Equally is the habit of superficial study 
to be shunned. In every department of 
knowledge I attach great importance and 
value to text-books. They are the fitting 
basis for study ; and without them one is 



STRENGTH. 19 

imperfectly qualified to go beyond them. 
But no science or part of a science is 
thoroughly studied, unless the mind has 
acted upon it in careful thought, so far as 
possible in independent research, and at 
least in attaining the various points of 
view accessible by the consultation of dif- 
ferent authorities. Moreover, it is always 
to be remembered that the object of study 
is, or ought to be, not acquisition only, but 
the invigorating of the powers of mind by 
which alone acquisition can be utilized. 

Strength of mind is in our own time 
constantly precluded or impaired by the 
fast life which we are tempted to lead, on 
the top of the tide of affairs, engrossed in 
whatever of novelty the passing moment 
may bring forth. There is such an 



20 CHARACTER-B UILDING. 

avalanche of current and transient in- 
terests as to distract the mind equally from 
the past and from the future. This is an 
influence which you will feel much more 
than now when you shall have entered 
upon professional or active life ; yet even 
now, as not in the earlier time which I so 
vividly remember, the outside world is con- 
stantly invading our college halls, and in 
the crowded life which is often forced upon 
us there are frequent hindrances to the 
concentration of thought and the close and 
strenuous application by which alone the 
mind can grow. That our time is unfavor- 
able to vigorous thinking may be seen in 
the genesis of opinions on practical sub- 
jects in the minds of most men of the 
world, who do not form their opinions, but 



STRENGTH. 21 

suffer them to be moulded by the attrition 
of their surroundings and associates, and 
do not determine their own modes of ac- 
tion, but go into the street or the public 
meeting with the cry, " Men and brethren, 
what shall I do?" Thus the conscience 
is no longer an internal, but a superficial 
organ, like the stomach in some of the 
lower orders of zoophytes. 

Weak minds, like weak bodies, are the 
cause of a very large amount of moral evil. 
A great part of the temptations to which 
we are exposed, especially in early life, 
come through human influence. The 
question of conduct is in every such case a 
question of strength between the tempter 
and the tempted. The latter may be 
rightly disposed and inclined ; yet this will 



22 CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 

be of no avail if he have not reasoning 
power to unravel the tempter's sophistry, 
judicial faculties to analyze and weigh his 
opinions, self-determining force to resist 
his dictation, vigor and activity of mind to 
fence the intellectual life from being 
broken into and trodden down by a mind 
of greater energy, and a distinct and strong 
current of thought, sentiment and feeling, 
which can have its own flow, and can wind 
among other currents without mingling 
and blending with them. No matter how 
the mind is enfeebled, whether by indo- 
lence, or by superficial work, or by modes 
of life all whose details individually are 
innocent, and collectively are wrong only 
by defect, the result is the same, — an 
incapacity for moral resistance, an over- 



STRENGTH. 23 



susceptibility of influences from without, 
an inability for self-defence. 

But while strength of body and strength 
of mind are of ethical value beyond esti- 
mate, they are of use, not as substitutes 
for moral principle, but as its allies and 
tributaries ; and I know of no moral prin- 
ciple worth contending for except that 
which is based on moral distinctions con- 
sidered as necessary, intrinsic, inevitable, 
co-eternal with God himself, and which did 
God fail to recognize, He would no longer 
deserve the trust, reverence and worship 
of man. There can be no question of con- 
duct that has not its infallibly right 
answer, — an absolutely right answer where 
there is perfect knowledge, which there is 
or may be in the overwhelming majority 



24 CHARACTERS UILDING. 



of cases, — an answer relatively right as 
regards the degree of knowledge where 
the knowledge is partial. Almost every 
case in which volition is exercised contains 
the elements of its own solution. In 
almost every instance in which you have 
a moral decision to make, you know as 
well just what you ought to do as you 
know the circumstances which call for 
your decision. If the question were asked 
you as to another person's duty under 
such and such circumstances, you would 
answer with as confident assurance as 
that with which you would affirm the 
sun's rising or the river's flowing. 

But independently of the direct personal 
influence of which I have spoken, there 
are two ways in which we all are strongly 



STRENGTH. 2$ 

tempted to diverge from what we know to 
be right. The first is compliance with the 
customs, habits, or judgment of those with 
whom we are most intimately associated, 
thus making the right a variable quantity, 
dependent, as it were, on latitude and 
longitude, and yet hardly so ; for these are 
reckoned from an unchanging equator and 
a fixed meridian. In saying this, I do not 
refer to customs that have no moral sig- 
nificance. In these, pliability and easy 
conformity are graceful, and betoken either 
gentle parentage, or high breeding, or both; 
and even St. Paul, with his inflexibility 
of principle, yet as true a gentleman as 
ever lived, rather boasts of his ability to 
become all things to all men. I speak 
now of the facility with which men often 



26 CHARACTER-BUILDING. 

lapse into the faults, and even the vices of 
the social medium in which they are for 
the time being, — abstinent here, self-indul- 
gent to the extreme limit of temperance 
there ; in this circle, pure and reverent in 
speech, in that, giving the tongue broad 
license ; at home heedful of religious sanc- 
tities and observances, at a fashionable 
watering-place or in a distant or foreign 
city utterly regardless of them. 

Now these compliances may not over- 
step the somewhat indefinite frontier be- 
tween virtue and vice ; but they do show 
a capacity for vice in full development. 
One's social medium may change from the 
more to the less scrupulous portion of the 
community in which he dwells or sojourns. 
He may sink unconsciously by the law of 



STRENGTH. 2>] 



gravitation, which includes falling bodies 
in the moral as in the material universe ; 
or he may make conscious and willing 
choice of associations that impose the min- 
imum of restraint. If not, he still lies open 
to temptation of any and every kind. His 
moral nature is a city without walls, invit- 
ing hostile incursions. He has no princi- 
ple of his own, no reason for the right that 
he practices or complies with, or for 
abstaining from the wrong from which he 
holds himself aloof. Now a man does 
need to have in his own soul reasons for 
doing and for not doing, and ought to fee] 
unspeakably ashamed of himself if he has 
not such reasons ; for if he has them not, 
his seeming virtue is in no sense his own. 
If he lived in a community of saints, and 



28 CHARACTER-BUILDING. 



conformed to all their ways, he would not 
be one whit the better for it, unless his 
outward virtue found pores through which 
it could be absorbed into his inward being. 
If he were in heaven, and said and did 
nothing unheavenly, it would be to him no 
heaven ; for place and mode of life are not 
character, and do not even shape charac- 
ter, unless there be an earnest desire to 
take in the sentiment and principle which 
they embody. 

The other danger to which I now have 
special reference is in the cases in which 
there is a distinct recognition of the abso- 
lute right, but a willingness to make a 
slight, only a very slight departure from it. 
Last week I was at Nantucket, the greater 
part of which is a sand waste, with tracks 



STRENGTH, 2$ 



rather than roads branching out from the 
town like the sticks of a fan. Each of 
these tracks leads to its own somewhither ; 
yet there are those that are so close to- 
gether at starting, that one might think it 
a matter of indifference which of two he 
took in order to reach his destination, 
though their termini may be miles apart. 
The Hebrew Scriptures make great ethical 
use of the metaphor of a way, and with 
profound truth. There is but one right 
way, on which every right act is an onward 
and ascending step ; and there is an 
instinctive tendency to move on in the 
way on which one has started, — a tendency 
that is intensified with every stage of 
progress. A very slight conscious deviation 
from the right is entering on a way- 



30 CHARACTER-B UILDING. 

which, seemingly diverging as by a mere 
hand's-breath, one who knows the right 
and thinks that he prefers it, is often will- 
ing to take, because it is almost right. 
He means but an act not to be repeated ; 
he finds it a way which, once taken, he is 
not inclined to leave. He repeats his steps 
in the direction in which it leads ; and 
while he thinks that he is still close by the 
right way, he has made so broad a deflec- 
tion from it that he has not moral enter- 
prise enough to return to it. I have often 
said and it cannot be too often or too 
earnestly repeated, There is no ex- 
ample which one is so prone to follow as 
his own; and therefore you cannot 
enter too fervently into the sentiment of 
the Hebrew Psalmist, " I hate the work of 
them who turn aside.' ' 



STRENGTH. 3 1 



I wish that in our religious and ethical 
speech the same use were currently made 
of the term righteousness, that is, rightness, 
that is made in the Holy Scriptures. The 
creation of righteousness is the absorbing 
aim and purpose of Christianity. Wor- 
ship, devout sentiment, emotional religion, 
unless they issue in righteousness, are 
worse than worthless, and especially so 
when they are in a certain sense sincere ; 
for then they deceive both one's self and 
others. I have no skepticism about his- 
torical Christianity (so-called) ; I believe 
in the risen no less than in the dying 
Saviour; but the one reason above all 
others why I have no doubt that Jesus 
is God's ambassador to man is that I ' 
behold in him the everlasting righteous- 



32 CHARACTER-BUILDING. 



ness incarnate, and I see so plainly that 
to obey and follow him is to incarnate 
that same righteousness in our own hearts 
and lives. 

This, my friends, is your great interest, 
transcending all others. You crave what 
is called success, and I heartily wish that 
it may be yours ; but what you want is the 
consciousness of success, and I do not 
think that you can have this, if there be 
within you anything short of upright prin- 
ciple, of an integrity which you would not 
part with for the world. I must say that 
in my large and long experience I have 
known no other real success, nor do I 
believe in any other. I have known, and 
the world has known, oh, how many ! and 
some of them illustrious instances of 



STRENGTH. 33 

what seemed pre-eminent success, on the 
part of men who, in order to obtain it, have 
made themselves less than pure, true and 
honest, who have sought it by muddy ways 
and tortuous mole-paths ; and the result 
has always been disappointment and sick- 
ness of heart with what has been won, and 
an insatiable longing for more. No man 
has ever really succeeded in this world, to 
say nothing of the world to come, whose 
life-purpose, ever nearing its full realiza- 
tion, might not have found fit utterance in 
those words which the Hebrew poet put 
into the mouth of the man over whom had 
swept all the billows of adversity, — " Till I 
die I will not remove my integrity from 
me. My heart shall not reproach me so 
long as I live." It is only he who can 



34 CHARACTER-BUILDING 



say this that has the strength which 
belongs to God's living sanctuary. 

I have spoken of ways. The way of 
righteousness, my friends, is your only 
true and happy way ; and if you ask how 
to find it, I know not where else to send 
you for guidance but to Him who alone 
could say with divine authority, "I am 
the way." 



III. 

BEAUTY. 



a |Bf§||P|TRENGTH anc i beauty are in 

E^®3| his sanctuary." 

The strength will not suffice for the per- 
fection of character without the beauty. 
As the beautiful in nature is something 
more than the useful, so is the beautiful 
in character something more than the 
substantially good. There are some char- 
acters which we cannnot help approving, 
yet cannot like. There are undeniably 
good people who yet make goodness 
unlovely. There is a certain grim sort 
of piety which, I have no doubt, is of 
value to the possessor, but can be of no 



$6 CHAR A CTER-B UILDING. 

attractive power to anyone else. There 
is, on the other hand, a type of goodness 
which awakens as much admiration as 
respect, as much love as approval. There 
is a beauty of holiness, which cannot, 
indeed, exist without strength, which 
needs the robust frame of a righteousness 
fit to be everlasting, but which rounds out 
and fills in that frame with the fine and 
delicate tracery and the precious adorn- 
ing, that attest the indwelling of the Spirit 
of God which is no less beauty-breathing 
than strength-giving. 

Among the most important hints for the 
creation of beauty in the character and 
the outraying of it in the life is one 
derived from art, namely, that beauty has 
no bharp angles. Its lines seem continu- 



BEAUTY. 37 



ous, so gently does curve melt into curve. 
It is sharp angles that keep many souls 
from being beautiful that are almost so. 
Our good seems less good than it is, and 
often seems not at all good, because it 
is abrupt, rude, ill-timed, or ill-placed. 
Brusquerie in speech, and in manners a 
lack of that love-born skill which is the 
only kind of courtesy worth cultivating, 
often vitiate what is well-meant, worthy in 
purpose, and in its essence perfectly fit- 
ting, and deprive even the kindest minis- 
tries of their beatific power. Then, too, 
some of us have fits of goodness, which 
begin and end abruptly, and even though 
in the intervals the life be not bad, it is 
less good, it is on a lower plane, and mars 
the symmetry of the character. Then 



3 8 CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 

again, some of us are betrayed by quick 
tempers into utterances and acts harshly at 
variance with our wonted habits of feeling. 
In all these ways such goodness as we have 
falls short of beauty. The truly beautiful 
life is even and uniform, — multitudinous 
indeed in its manifestations, yet pervaded 
by the same spirit, which breaks into 
various and many-toned harmony, as does 
the blast which sweeps through the pipes 
of the organ, when a skilled hand opens the 
valves. 

But let it be said emphatically that the 
beauty of character cannot be put on. It 
is not veneering, but solid work. Its 
exterior must have an interior of the same 
material and finish. The soul of beauty 
alone can create the form of beauty. 



BEAUTY. 39 



Mere outside goodness never looks lovely. 
You cannot so fit a mask to the face that 
its seams and sutures shall not be seen. 

The beauty of which I speak, it should 
be borne in mind, belongs to the whole of 
life, to things which we call little as well 
as to those that seem great. Nothing can 
be too small, or mean, or trivial to form a 
part of a beautiful life. Things are small 
and mean only when we render them so by 
the spirit which we put into them ; and 
the least things are made great, and the 
least comely things beautiful, by the 
beauty of soul with which they are done, 
or endured, or enjoyed. 

I spoke of Jesus Christ as a carpenter. 
I once saw a picture of Joseph's carpenter's 
shop, and Jesus, as a mere stripling, work- 



40 CHAR A CTER-B UILDING. 

ing at the bench. The only light 
in the picture was from the halo 
round his head, and that holy light 
bathed the rough beams and rafters in its 
glow, rested in mellow radiance on the 
chips and shavings on the floor, and made 
the rude interior look like a very fore-court 
heaven. The painter was right. If Jesus 
bore his part, as I have not the slightest 
doubt that he did, in the labor that sup- 
ported his mother and sisters, then was 
there the same divine beauty in his hand- 
ling the plane and the saw, as when his 
word gave sight to the blind or rolled back 
the shadow of death. So far as we put 
the spirit that we may breathe in from 
him into the humblest details of our work 
or our recreation, we make it truly, nay, in 
our measure, divinely beautiful. 



BEAUTY. 41 



This beauty of character you need, not 
only for your own sake, but equally for 
your social influence, — for the good that you 
may do in the world, which I trust will 
enter into the life-purpose of every one of 
you. It is this element of character more 
than anything else that gives goodness its 
beneficent power. You will do good, less 
by what you say or do, or even give, than 
by what you are. What you say or do for 
others, and in many instances what you 
give, is a small multiplicand, of which your 
own soul, the amount of spiritual beauty 
that there is in you, is by far the greater 
multiplier, and the product depends 
mainly on the multiplier. 

Among those who go about doing good, 
it is not merely the full-handed, but much 



42 CHARACTER-B UILDING. 

more the full-hearted, whom the ear that 
hears them blesses, and to whom the eye 
that sees them bears witness. Such per- 
sons may have little to give, or may regard 
it as their true charity to give but little ; 
yet their genial presence, their tender sym- 
pathy, their gentleness and kindness, in 
unnumbered instances, restore the lost 
power of self-help, check wasteful vice, 
relieve else hopeless depression, and ward 
off dependence and pauperism ; while if 
they went with full purses, yet without the 
beauty of holiness and love, they would 
only deepen and perpetuate poverty and 
vice. The same principle applies to all 
modes of beneficence, — to all the offices 
of kindness which you can render. They 
derive their worth and efficacy from what 



BEAUTY. 43 



of the beauty of soul you can put into 
them. 

A peculiarly good life is often spoken 
of, by the misuse of a scriptural phrase 
appropriate in its place and use, as a hid- 
den life. In the common sense of the 
words, nothing could be less true. A 
good life is indeed hidden, inasmuch as it 
makes no show ; where there is a show of 
goodness we may be sure that there is 
little else. But a truly good life cannot be 
really hidden. Through the thickest veil 
it shines, and makes the most opaque 
medium transparent. You can add no 
line, or touch, or tint of beauty to your 
own soul, that shall not enrich your social 
life, and thus enable you, by example and 
influence, by word and deed, to be of more 



44 CHARACTER-B UILDING. 

worth and service to the world around 
you. 

My friends, the Beatitudes in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount are the soul's manual 
of beauty. Take them, I beg you, for the 
picture of what you ought to be, for the 
ideal of your constant aspiration, for the 
directory of your daily life ; and feel that 
the utmost grace, sweetness, loveliness 
that you can attain in this world, the 
surest pledge of a growing fitness for the 
higher life all radiant with the beauty of 
holiness, is the consciousness that you 
have an increasing property in these 
benedictions. 

" Strength and beauty are in his sanc- 
tuary." Let me ask you to consider for a 



BEAUTY. 45 



moment how they are not only blended, 
but unified in him whose earthly life was 
the shrine of God's perpetual indwelling. 
I have spoken of his strength and of his 
beauty. Can you separate them? Can 
you think of them apart ? Can you imag- 
ine that the record of his might would 
have traversed the ages, had not that 
might been at the same time transcendent 
beauty ? Suppose that there were in his 
life-story mere deeds of marvellous power, 
where we read of his tender sympathy, of 
his tears with those who wept, of his 
gentle, kindly intercourse with the grief- 
stricken and the sin-stricken, of his taking 
little children in his arms so lovingly, 
think you that he would have made his. 
way as he has along these centuries, con-., 
quering and still to conquer ? 



46 CHAR A CTER-B UILDING. 

Yet more — it would demand an hour, a 
day, a volume, to say as it ought to be said 
what I must say in a moment — is it not 
through the beauty of his holiness, more, 
far more, than by his omnipotence, that 
God takes possession of our hearts and 
subdues our wills to his ? To the 
Supreme, Almighty Ruler of the universe 
we might in fear render cold and distant 
homage and slavish obedience. But we 
become the willing servants of the Father 
God, whose joy-giving Spirit wraps our 
whole lives in his own robe of peerless 
beauty, who makes all the powers of 
nature tributary to the benignity of his 
loving kindness, who by everything beau- 
tiful in its time and for its use claims a 
reverence which is but love intensified, a 



BEAUTY. 47 



love which is but reverence made sweet 
and tender. 

My friends, I have thus brought these 
elements of strength and beauty together, 
because I so feel your need of them both 
and equally in the life that lies before you. 
You need them both, even in your specula- 
tive philosophy. Research and reasoning 
are not the sole avenues to truth. The 
aesthetic faculties are also cognitive pow- 
ers. Their intuition is oftener infallible 
than reasoning, because based on surer 
premises. They bring us, through the 
beauty which shapes itself in our souls, 
into harmony with all that is fair and 
lovely in the universe, and thus give us a 
profounder knowledge of the infinite 
Creator than the unemotional processes of 



48 CHARACTER-BUILDING 

intellect can reach. There is, too, in the 
entire realm of spiritual being a wealth of 
beauty into which a cognate spirit alone 
can enter. Indeed, there is an instinct of 
the moral nature which precedes and 
transcends reason, and apprehends by its 
own affinity truths beyond the scope of an 
unspiritual philosophy, but revealed to the 
soul suffused with the beauty of holiness. 

This same union of the stronger and 
gentler elements of character should sub- 
sist in your active life-work, in which I 
crave for you the will and the opportunity 
for earnest and energetic industry and 
aggressive mental enterprise ; but for this 
you will only find a greater need of traits 
of spirit that shall temper the hardness 
and dryness of a busy career with humane 



BEAUTY, 49 



sympathies, and affections both Godward 
and manward. There is no life that is not 
arid and dreary if the soul of beauty have 
no place in it. Seek then with the 
strength of your youth the beauty which 
shall make it even immeasurably stronger. 
On your lifeway, plant, wherever you can, 
instead of the thorn the fir tree, instead of 
the brier the myrtle. Show by your faith- 
ful culture that flowers, the very flowers 
of heaven, can bloom along the busiest 
paths that it may be yours to tread. 

May your career through this earthly 
life be so energized by strength con- 
secrated to the service of God and man, 
and so irradiated by the beauty of a pure, 
meek, and gentle spirit, that it shall be 
pursued with no change but progress 



50 CHAR A C TER-B UILDING. 

in the life beyond death. May God 
Almighty bless you. May your minds 
and hearts be kept in his knowledge and 
love, and your steps in the way of his 
commandments. 



BOOKS OP TRAVEL, HEALTH. &c. 



The Pictorial Cabinet of Marvels. Comprising History, 
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Grandmamma's Letters from Japan. By Mrs. Mary Pruyn. 

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Mrs. Pruyn, one of the leading ladies of Albany in social position and 
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letters should be in every home and Sunday-school library. 

" Mrs. Pruyn is a close and intelligent observer."-- Evening Journal, 
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Sketches Of Palestine. A Description of Scenes in the Holy 
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steel Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, the tour having been their 
wedding trip. 16mo. Cloth, 75c. 
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Travels in Bible Xjands. By Rev. Emerson Andrews. l6mo. 

17 illustrations. Cloth, 80c. 

Contains letters written by Mr. Andrews during one of his visits to the 
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Tact, Push and Principle. By William M. Thayer. 12mo. 

370 pages. Cloth, $1.50. 

A book for every young man. Gives the elements, principles, and 
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The Human Body and Health. By E. Small, M.D. 12mo. 

432 pages. Illustrated. $1.50. 

A book that should be in every household, and with which old and 
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One of the most helpful and inspiring books on the means and methods 

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His Opportunity: A story of American life, by a cultured factory 
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For every young man who desires to make the most of himself, and all 
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."It 1? one of the books that will be read and reread, and shape character 
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This work is the one popular life of Prest Gaiheld, fur young and old, 
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"I know of nothing in the whole range of Sunday-school literature so 
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From Tannery to the "White House. The Life 

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*' ( -f Mr. Thayer's 'Life of Garfield' a quarter of a million copies hare 
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Character Building. By A. P. Peabody, D. D. Professor in 
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"jis^w^wsB^-a k sr. — of 

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" There is not in this work, so far as we have been able to discover* , 
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Portrait. 12mo. Cloth. $1.50. 

This work, drawn from the author's experience, is invaluable to all 
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" Nothing has for a long time been published, better adapted to 
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Revivals, and How to Promote Them. By Rev. Orson 

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Revival Sermons. By Rev. Emerson Andrews. 12mo. Cloth, 
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This volume contains fifty-four condensed sermons by this revival 
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Memorial of Prof. Elihu Boot. By Prof. H. 1 . LtelL 

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The Human Will. B^ '*». A. B. Eaile, D.D. 18mo. 

Cloth. 25c. 

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Pearls of Worlds. By Rev. Emerson Andrews. With Por 

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